VATICAN CITY (RNS) The official preacher to Pope Benedict XVI, during a Good Friday sermon in St. Peter’s Basilica, likened recent media coverage of the pope’s record on clerical sex abuse to propaganda spread against Jews.
With Benedict listening in, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the papal household, quoted what he said was a letter from a Jewish friend expressing “disgust” at charges that Benedict, while still a cardinal, mishandled cases of pedophile priests in Munich and Milwaukee.
Cantalamessa said that his friend called such charges a “violent … attack against the church, the pope and the faithful.”
Moreover, the letter said, the “use of stereotype, and the shift from personal to collective responsibility and blame, remind me of the most shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”
The letter concluded, Cantalamessa said, by vowing solidarity with the pope and the Catholic Church on behalf on “all those in the Jewish world (and they are many) who share these sentiments of brotherhood.”
But some Jewish leaders call the decision to quote the letter “sad and ironic,” because it came on the very day — Good Friday — when European Jews throughout history had been persecuted on charges of deicide.
“It’s sad that a person of the cloth, a senior priest, doesn’t know or understand the history of anti-Semitism that he would make such a comparison,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League. Cantalamessa should have had the “good sense” not to quote the letter, he said.
“There is a crisis in the church, and we are sensitive to that,” Foxman said, “but to compare it to anti-Semitism, which led to pogroms, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust, is either the height of ignorance or insensitivity.”
While relations between Jews and Catholics have been bumpy during Benedict’s five years as pope, Foxman said Benedict has “gone a long way to repair some of the damage.” Cantalamessa’s remarks will not adversely affect that relationship, Foxman added.
The remarks also struck a sour note with David Clohessy, national director of the St. Louis-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, who said it was “morally wrong” to equate violence against Jews with criticism of the church.
“Those who hatefully disparage Jewish people do so because of myths about their spiritual beliefs that harm no one,” Clohessy said. “Those who thoughtfully question the Catholic hierarchy do so because of facts about their callous misdeeds which harm hundreds of thousands.”
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The sermon followed a week of statements from Catholic leaders in Europe and North America who forcefully defended the 82-year-old pontiff.
Last Sunday (March 28), New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan likened the pope’s current trials to the sufferings of Jesus before the crucifixion.
In a Good Friday blog post, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston refuted “much confusion and misinformation” about Benedict’s record on sex abuse of children by priests.
“What is very clear to me, and I think to all who are fair-minded,” O’Malley wrote, is that Benedict “has been dedicated to eradicating sexual abuse in the Church and trying to rectify the mistakes of the past.”
